In Brahms' "Engine Room"

Yesterday evening, when many San Franciscans were flocking to Davies Symphony Hall to get their first taste of Gustavo Dudamel conducting the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra, my wife and I drove down the Peninsula to Kohl Mansion in Burlingame to hear members of the San Francisco Symphony play a chamber music program organized by pianist Peter Grunberg. I enjoy listening to Grunberg's performances, and I find he usually has interesting things to say about the music he performs. So was glad to hear that he had arranged to give a talk about the Hungarian theme of the program he had arranged one hour before the concert began. Ironically, the most interesting parts of the program had only remote connections to what could be called a Hungarian idiom: The Ligeti horn trio is probably as much about departing from that idiom (beginning with a not-particularly-veiled reference to the opening motif of Beethoven's "Les Adieux" piano sonata), while the Brahms G minor piano quartet has its "Rondo alla Zingarese," which certainly acknowledges the idiom and then proceeds to take it in decidedly non-idiomatic directions. Grunberg did not try to dismiss the remoteness of those connections; and, as a result, his pre-performance remarks served up considerable foot for thought. Since I am still sorting out much of what he decided to cover, I want to concentrate, for now, on a single tidbit.

In discussing the Brahms piano quartet, Grunberg raised one of my favorite questions: At a time when the durational scale of music kept getting longer (an attribute of nineteenth-century composition that Donald Frances Tovey had addressed in his "music" entry for the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica), how was Brahms able to maintain a sense of coherence for a piece of chamber music that lasted about three-quarters of an hour? This was when Grunberg invoked the metaphor in my title, confessing that he enjoyed "going down to the engine room" of a composition to get to know what makes it work the way it does. He addressed his question with a strategy that I had first heard presented by Deryck Cooke in a lecture that the British musicologist had given at MIT during my student days. Cooke's talk was about Brahms' second symphony and his focus was on the relation between the first and fourth movements. He wanted to demonstrate that the opening three notes of the first movement provided a key motif that would ultimately develop into the binding force that not only held together the final movement but also liked it back to its origins. Since, at the time, I was very interested in trying to detect such note-to-note patterns with computer software, I found Cooke's talk very appealing.

Grunberg took this strategy and applied it to all four movements of the piano quartet, also distilling the key motif down to a single two-note semitone ascent. This struck me as problematic. First of all, once you get down to such a microscopic level this sort of game becomes very easy to play. After all, you can find that pattern is just about any melodic embellishment. The question is not whether or not the motif recurs with great frequency; the question is whether all those recurrences are "created equal" or whether (more likely) some are "more equal" than others, having a higher "standing" in that grammatical sorting-out of the embellishing and the embellished. Regular readers know that I opt for the latter strategy in approaching music, jazz or classical and "on the page" or in performance. This is not to say that I dismiss the idea that a two-note motif can provide the cohering force for a music work of considerable duration. One of my favorite examples remains the opening gesture of the fourth symphony by Ralph Vaughan Williams, which happens to be a descending semitone that would complement the motif behind Grunberg's argument. Vaughan Williams, however, was not interested in playing hide-and-seek with this motif (and may thus be criticized for being a bit too obvious with it), while in Brahms we are left wondering just how ludic he intended to be.

Then there is the question of how such a micro-strategic insight translates into performance. Here I am afraid that Grunberg and his fellow musicians were at a disadvantage. Kohl Mansion is a rather awesome piece of architecture, but its great hall was not designed with acoustics in mind. Consequently, if there really were some interesting strategies in this piano quartet being played out at the micro-level, it was not particularly easy for even the informed ear (such as an ear that had heard the same composition only a few weeks earlier) to grasp them. As a result the very circumstances of the performance gave a heavy bias to rhetoric over grammar; and, for the most part, the rhetoric took that same sort of over-the-top abandon that worked so well in that last performance I attended. In comparison I would say that I preferred Menachem Pressler's performance at the San Francisco Conservatory; but there is a major generation gap between Pressler and Grunberg. Pressler has years of experience with being "wild and wooly" in his performances; and he had no trouble bringing the rest of his group into that same territory. Grunberg has the potential to venture into that same space just as confidently; but this particularly performance did not seem to offer the right place (at least acoustically) for such a venture.